The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 17 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Shear: Org structure has only two moves: centralizing and decentralizing
“There is a fundamental tension or trade-off between centralizing and decentralizing, and those are really the only two moves.”
Shear: Growing companies inevitably require reorgs every 18 to 36 months
“You just sort of inevitably wind up on a 18, 24 month, 36 month beat, having a reorg at some level. And that's not something to fear, but something that you should embrace.”
Shear: Communities cannot be built directly, they must be grown like gardens
“The particular object level advice would be that you don't build communities, you grow them. Your communities are more like a garden than they are a building. And like a garden, it's important that you, there's things you can do to make the garden more likely …”
Shear: Early startup CEOs must lead product or sales, not allocate resources
“So in the beginning, that's, I think that's absolutely not true. Like, I think that you're a six person startup. The best CEO is either an amazing salesperson or an amazing product leader. Or a brilliant engineer, and they, whatever it is that the company real…”
Twitch pitched around 40 VCs before raising post-pivot round with Bessemer
“The first VC round after the pivot was with Bessemer and we struggled to raise that round. We had to pitch a lot of VCs, but Bessemer is amazing, but like we probably pitched four EVCs in that round. It was a struggle. Nobody wanted to invest in Twitch at firs…”
Shear predicts Twitch will expand into non-gaming live streaming over five years
“For Twitch, I think the next five years is all about growing the base of the kinds of content that you can live stream. And interact around and making that really easy.”
Shear: College is optimal for launching startups due to risk tolerance
“We were never going to have higher risk tolerance, and we were never going to have more access to other smart people than we did right men. And so if we're going to start a startup, maybe that was the best time to do it.”
Shear: Waiting for a great idea prevents founders from starting
“I don't think if I'd waited to have an actually good idea or to know what I was doing that I would have ever actually gotten started.”
Shear: Justin.tv co-founders kept the company afloat using personal Kiko proceeds
“When we started Justin TV, we took some of the money that we earned from Kiko Not very much, but like a little bit. We wound up actually lending it to the company to keep the company afloat when we didn't have any cash in the bank”
Shear: Product-market fit doesn't reduce startup work, it shifts the sprint
“Product market fit is just as much work. It's a different kind of work, but you're sprinting after it as hard as you can, barely keeping up with this boulder rolling downhill, rather than agonizingly trying to push it up the hill.”
Shear: Founders must separate core thesis persistence from tactical pivots
“I do generally believe you want to know the bedrock first principle things about the world that you have faith in. So a good example of this might be like Amazon believing that commerce is going to go online in the nineties. Amazon clearly had a belief shoppin…”
Shear: Communication formats dictate which ideas succeed in organizations
“The way you connect, the way you communicate, the format you're using determines at some level the kinds of ideas that, not that you can express almost any idea in almost any medium, but the kinds of ideas that flow well, that other people will want to absorb,…”
Shear: Apple requires high-fidelity demos to secure internal project funding
“The way you pitch for resources for a new Apple product. A lot of the time is a full fidelity demo. And you actually make a full touch and feel high fidelity demo of the experience that the customer is going to have. And then the vice president of the area who…”
Shear: Early-stage CEOs must be control freaks when teams are small
“I think that good CEOs are often kind of control freaks early on because there's no one else to do it and somebody needs to make sure everything is going well.”
Shear: Tucows bought web calendar Kiko on eBay for roughly $258,000
“It winds up getting bought by two cows for, I'm gonna get the number wrong, but I think it's, like, 258,000.”
Shear: Kiko Calendar and Justin.tv never found sustainable product-market fit
“And we never achieved product market fit with Kiko Calendar. We did a little bit, certain brief moments. We had something that kind of was akin to product market fit with Justin TV, but then it turned out the hill wasn't very high, and the boulder didn't roll …”
Shear: Twitch CEO role shifted to resource allocation around 400 employees
“And I think for me at Twitch, that happened somewhere around 400 people. It stopped being something where my main job was to figure out what we should do and where we should go and how to meet the customer needs and started being more about deciding where to a…”